by Matt Haig
The sky is always the sky
JUST NOW I looked out of the window and felt calmer. The moon is a real flirt tonight behind a veil of bruise-blue cloud. This sky is sensational. No photo would catch it.
And this reminded me of something. When I had a long episode of depression about a decade ago, the worst depression I have had since my breakdown in my twenties, one of the few comforts I used to get was looking at the sky. We lived in Yorkshire, and there wasn’t that much light pollution, and so the sky was vast and clear. I’d take the bins out and just look at the night sky and feel myself and my pain getting smaller. I’d stand there for a while breathing the cool air, staring at stars and planets and constellations. I would breathe deeply, as if the cosmos was something you could inhale. I’d sometimes place my hand on my stomach and feel the stuttery flutter of my nervous breathing begin to settle.
I often wondered, and still wonder, why the sky, especially the night sky, had such an effect. I used to think it was to do with the scale. When you look up at the cosmos you can’t help but feel minuscule. You feel the smallness of yourself not only in space but also in time. Because, of course, when you stare into space you are staring up at ancient history. You are staring at stars as they were, not as they are. Light travels. It doesn’t just instantaneously appear. It moves at 186,000 miles per second. Which sounds fast, but also means that light from the closest star to Earth (after the sun) took over four years to get here.
But some of the stars visible to the naked eye are over 15,000 light years away. Which means the light reaching your eye began its journey at the end of the Ice Age. Before humans knew how to farm land. Contrary to popular belief, most of the stars that we see with our eyes are not dead. Stars, unlike us, exist for a very long time. But that adds to, rather than takes away from, the therapeutic majesty of the night sky. Our beautiful but tiny brief role within the cosmos is as that rarest of galactic things: a living, breathing, conscious organism.
When looking at the sky, all our 21st-century worries can be placed in their cosmic context. The sky is bigger than emails and deadlines and mortgages and internet trolls. It is bigger than our minds, and their illnesses. It is bigger than names and nations and dates and clocks. All of our earthly concerns are quite transient when compared to the sky. Through our lives, throughout every chapter of human history, the sky has always been the sky.
And, of course, when we are looking at the sky we aren’t looking at something outside ourselves. We are looking, really, at where we came from. As physicist Carl Sagan wrote in his masterpiece Cosmos: ‘The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.’
The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic. It’s the most wonderful thing. And you need to make like a tree or a bird and just feel a part of the great natural order now and again. You are incredible. You are nothing and everything. You are a single moment and all eternity. You are the universe in motion.
Well done.
Nature
THE SKY HAS been shown to soothe us.
In 2018 a research study conducted by King’s College London found that being able to see the sky helps our mental health. And not just the sky. Seeing trees, hearing birdsong, being outside, and feeling in contact with nature.
Participants in the study went out into the world, and were instructed to record their mental states at different locations. Interestingly, the study was quite nuanced as it factored in each individual’s risk of developing poor mental health by doing some early tests on each participant to assess impulsive behaviours.
The study, catchily titled ‘Urban Mind: Using Smartphone Technologies to Investigate the Impact of Nature on Mental Wellbeing in Real Time’, found that while being out in the natural world is good for everyone, it is of particular benefit for those who are more predisposed to mental health problems like addiction, ADHD, antisocial personality disorder and bipolar disorder.
‘Short-term exposure to nature has a measurable beneficial impact on mental wellbeing,’ concluded Dr Andrea Mechelli, who had helped to lead the research.
Ecotherapy or ‘green care’ projects are on the rise. Many city farms and community gardens are now used for mental health work to lower stress, anxiety and depression. Of course, in many ways this is all acting on old advice: ‘Get yourself some fresh air.’ In 1859, in her Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote that ‘after a closed room, what hurts them [patients] most is a dark room’ and advised that ‘it is not only light but direct sunlight they want’. Finally, evidence is catching up.
The trouble is, over half the world’s population now live in big cities. In 1950 more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in rural settlements. Now, worldwide, most people live in urban areas. And, as people spend more time indoors than ever before, it’s clear that we aren’t existing much amid forests and under natural skies.
It’s time we started being more aware that the blues and greens of nature can help us. And the lives of children, too. More fresh air, more direct sunlight, maybe even if we are lucky the odd walk across fields and through forests. And perhaps also, armed with evidence, we can help to make the communal urban spaces we inhabit a bit more green and pleasant, too, so that everyone can benefit from nature, not just the lucky few.
The world inside
SO, YES, THE beauty of nature can heal. But in Ibiza, in 1999, I stood on top of a cliff near the villa where I was living, tucked into one of the quieter corners on the east of the island, and urged myself to jump.
I literally had no way of coping – or none that I could see – with the mental pain and confusion I was going through, and wished I had no one who cared about me, so I could just leave and disappear with minimal impact.
I sometimes think of that cliff edge. Of the scrubby grass I stood on, of the glittering sea I stared out at, and the limestone coastline stretching out. None of that, at the time, consoled me. Nature is shown to be good for us, but in the moment of crisis nothing helps. No view in the world could have made me feel any better in that moment of extreme invisible pain. That view won’t have changed much over two decades. And yet I could stand there now and feel its beauty, and feel so different to the terrified young man I had been.
The world affects us, but it isn’t quite us. There is a space inside us that is independent to what we see and where we are. This means we can feel pain amid external beauty and peace. But the flipside is that we can feel calm in a world of fear. We can cultivate a calmness inside us, one that lives and grows, and gets us through.
There is a cliché about reading. That there are as many books as there are readers. Meaning every reader has their own take on a book. Five people could sit down and read, say, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and have five totally different legitimate responses. It isn’t really about what you read, but how you read it. The writer might start a story but they need a reader for it to come alive, and it never comes alive the same way twice. The story is never just the words. It is also the reading of them. And that is the variable. That is where the magic lives. All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.
The world is like that, too. There are as many worlds as there are inhabitants. The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.
We have to find, within all those billions of human worlds, the one we want to live on. The one that, without us imagining it, would never ar
rive.
And, likewise, we have to understand that however it might influence them, the world is not our feelings. We can feel calm in a hospital, or in pain on a Spanish clifftop.
We can contradict ourselves. We can contradict the world. We can sometimes even do the impossible. We can live when death seems inevitable. And we can hope after we knew hope had gone.
You, unplugged
LIFE CAN SOMETIMES feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it’s hard to hear the song at all.
And like that overcrowded song we, too, can feel a bit lost.
Our natural selves haven’t changed in tens of thousands of years, and we should remember that, with every new app or smartphone or social media platform or nuclear weapon we design. We should remember the song of being human. To think of the air when we feel stuck underwater. To find some calm amid an age of saturated marketing and breaking news and the million daily jolts of the internet. To be unafraid of being afraid. To be our own brilliant, true, beautiful, fragile, flawed, imperfect, animal, ageing, wonderful selves, trapped in time and space, made free by our ability to stop, at any moment, and find something – a song, a sunbeam, a conversation, a piece of pretty graffiti – and feel the sheer improbable wonder of being alive.
18
EVERYTHING YOU ARE IS ENOUGH
‘There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.’
—Aldous Huxley
Things that have almost always been
CLIFFS. TREE FERNS. Companionship. Sky. The man in the moon. The sentimentality of sunrises and sunsets. Eternal love. Dizzy lust. Abandoned plans. Regret. Cloudless night skies. Full moons. Morning kisses. Fresh fruit. Oceans. Seas. Tides. Rivers. Lakes as still as mirrors. Faces full of friendship. Comedy. Laughter. Stories. Myths. Songs. Hunger. Pleasure. Sex. Death. Faith. Fire. The deep silent goodness of the observing self. The light made brighter by the dark around it. Eye contact. Dancing. Meaningless conversation. Meaningful silence. Sleep. Dreams. Nightmares. Monsters made of shadows. Turtles. Sawfish. The fresh green of wet grass. The bruised purple of clouds at dusk. The wet crash of waves on slow-eroding rocks. The dark slick shine of wet sand. The gasping relief of a thirst quenched. The terrible, tantalising awareness of being alive. The now that for ever is made of. The possibility of hope. The promise of home.
What I tell myself when things get too much
1.It’s okay.
2.Even if it isn’t okay, if it’s a thing you can’t control, don’t try to control it.
3.You feel misunderstood. Everyone is misunderstood. Don’t worry about other people understanding you. Aim to understand yourself. Nothing else will matter after that.
4.Accept yourself. If you can’t be happy as yourself, at least accept yourself as you are right now. You can’t change yourself if you don’t know yourself.
5.Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.
6.Find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you’ll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.
7.Don’t fix yourself down. Don’t be blinded by the connotations of your name, gender, nationality, sexuality or Facebook profile. Be more than data to be harvested. ‘When I let go of what I am,’ said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, ‘I become what I might be.’
8.Slow down. Also Lao Tzu: ‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’
9.Enjoy the internet. Don’t use it when you aren’t enjoying it. (Nothing has sounded so easy and been so hard.)
10.Remember that many people feel like you. You can even go online and find them. This is one of the most therapeutic aspects of the social media age. You can find an echo of your pain. You can find someone who will understand.
11.As Yoda nearly put it, you can’t try to be. Trying is the opposite of being.
12.The things that make you unique are flaws. Imperfections. Embrace them. Don’t seek to filter out your human nature.
13.Don’t let marketing convince you that happiness is a commercial transaction. As the Cherokee-American cowboy Will Rogers once put it, ‘Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.’
14.Never miss breakfast.
15.Go to bed before midnight most days.
16.Even during manic times – Christmas, family occasions, hectic work patches, city holidays – find some moments of peace. Retreat to a bedroom now and then. Add a comma to your day.
17.Shop less.
18.Do some yoga. It’s harder to be stressed out if your body and your breath isn’t.
19.When times get rocky, keep a routine.
20.Do not compare the worst bits of your life with the best bits of other people’s.
21.Value the things most that you’d miss the most if they weren’t there.
22.Don’t try to pin yourself down. Don’t try to understand, once and for all, who you are. As the philosopher Alan Watts said, ‘trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth’.
23.Go for a walk. Go for a run. Dance. Eat peanut butter on toast.
24.Don’t try to feel something you don’t feel. Don’t try to be something you can’t be. That energy will exhaust you.
25.Connecting with the world has nothing to do with wi-fi.
26.There is no future. Planning for the future is just planning for another present in which you will be planning for the future.
27.Breathe.
28.Love now. Love right now. If you have someone or something to love, do it this instant. Love fearlessly. As Dave Eggers wrote: ‘It is no way to live, to wait to love.’ Throw love out there selflessly.
29.Don’t feel guilty. It is almost impossible, unless you are a sociopath, not to feel some guilt these days. We are cluttered with guilt. There is the guilt we learned at childhood mealtimes, the guilt of eating while knowing there are starving people in the world. The guilt of privilege. The eco-guilt of driving a car or flying in a plane or using plastic. The guilt of buying stuff that may be unethical in some way we can’t quite see. The guilt of unspoken or unfaithful desires. The guilt of not being the things other people wanted you to be. The guilt of taking up space. The guilt of not being able to do things other people can do. The guilt of being ill. The guilt of living. It’s useless, this guilt. It doesn’t help anyone. Try to do good right now, without drowning in whatever bad you might once have done.
30.See yourself outside market forces. Don’t compete in the game. Resist the guilt of non-doing. Find the uncommodified space inside us. The true space. The human space. The space that could never be measured in terms of numbers or money or productivity. The space that the market economy can’t see.
31.Look at the sky. (It’s amazing. It’s always amazing.)
32.Spend some time with a non-human animal.
33.Be unashamedly boring. Boring can be healthy. When life gets tough, aim for those beige emotions.
34.Don’t value yourself in line with other people’s valuation of yourself. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’
35.The world can be sad. But remember a million unsung acts of kindness happened today. A million acts of love. Quiet human goodness lives on.
36.Don’t beat yourself up for being a mess. It’s fine. The universe is a mess. Galaxies are drifting all over the place. You’re just in tune with the cosmos.
37.If you’re feeling mentally unwell, treat yourself as you would any physical problem. Asthma, flu, whatever. Do what you need to do to get better. And have no shame about i
t. Don’t keep walking around on a broken leg.
38.It’s okay to cry. People cry. Women cry. And men cry. They have tear ducts and lachrymal glands just like other human beings. A man crying is no different from a woman crying. It’s natural. Social roles are toxic when they don’t allow an outlet for pain. Or sentimental emotion. Cry, human. Cry your heart out.
39.Allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to doubt. Allow yourself to feel vulnerable. Allow yourself to change your mind. Allow yourself to be imperfect. Allow yourself to resist dynamism. Allow yourself not to shoot through life like an arrow speeding with purpose.
40.Try to want less. A want is a hole. A want is a lack. That is part of the definition. When the poet Byron wrote ‘I want a hero’ he meant that he didn’t have one. The act of wanting things we don’t need makes us feel a lack we didn’t have. Everything you need is here. A human being is complete just being human. We are our own destination.
Diminishing returns
PLANET EARTH IS unique. It is the only place we know of where life exists in the vast cosmic arena of the universe. It is an incredible place. On its own, it gives us everything humans need to survive.
And you are also incredible. Equally so. You were incredible from the day you were born. You were everything from the day you were born. No one looks at a newborn baby and thinks, oh dear, look at all that absence of stuff. They look at a baby and they feel like they are looking at perfection, untainted by the complexities and baggage of life yet to come.
We come complete. Give us some food and drink and shelter, sing us a song, tell us a story, give us people to talk to and care for and fall in love with and there you go. A life.
But somewhere along the way we have raised the threshold of what we need, or feel we need, to be happy.
